Mining hard times for humor is the American way

Hey, did you hear the joke about the Great Recession of 2008-10? You’ll be laughing all the way to the poorhouse, or the federal penitentiary in Bernie Madoff’s case. (Bah-DUM-bum?)

Oh, we’ve got a billion of ‘em, folks. Make that 700 billion if you’re a banker with powerful friends in Washington. For instance, take Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers -- please.

For the tens of millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs, homes and dreams in the current economic downturn and the millions more who’ve witnessed the disaster with mounting anxiety and fury, there’s nothing very funny about the financial crash of 2008 and its roiling aftermath. And the scalding Tea Party populism that apparently fueled last month’s upset Republican victory in the Massachusetts Senate race should make politicians shudder, not chuckle. The Coco-Leno-Letterman snark wars aside, there’s little cause for mirth these days.

But you might not guess it from tuning into U.S. popular culture lately. In movies, television and elsewhere, comedy and satire, albeit of a frequently cynical and absurdist vein, appears to have become the default mode for dealing with our economic malaise.

The yuk-fest started even as the stock market was going into free fall, and it hasn’t let up. A Vanity Fair cover from the disastrous autumn of 2008 depicted actors Paul Rudd, Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill and Jason Segel wearing top hats, tuxedo collars, wooden barrels and hangdog expressions next to the headline “Brother, Can You Spare a Laugh?”

An online site proffering gag gifts for the downwardly mobile hawks T-shirts with such slogans as “Dude Where’s My Bailout?” Is that righteous anger we detect or jokey resignation?

Characteristically, the entertainment industry is doing its best to mirror the national mood while avoiding sentiments angry or bleak enough to make audiences stop buying flat-screen TVs and movie tickets and go march in the streets. Even or perhaps especially when it’s evident that a movie, novel or TV show’s sympathies lie with the economically destitute -- hello, HBO’s “Hung” -- it seems there’s an unspoken consensus that the bitter pill of unpleasant realities must be sweetened with a modicum of one-liners.

In writer-director Jason Reitman’s “Up in the Air,” for example, the charming, debonair corporate hit man played by George Clooney engages in banter that could’ve been lifted straight out of a 1930s screwball comedy while flying around the country laying off people. Just swap Clooney and his costar Anna Kendrick for Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, and you’ve got a designer-label update of the Frank Capra classic comedy “It Happened One Night,” which came out at the height of the Great Depression. But there’s one crucial difference: Capra’s films never strayed from their populist fan base, whereas “Up in the Air” necessarily maintains a sense of detachment from the human suffering on the ground.

In adapting and updating Walter Kirn’s 2001 novel, Reitman slips in a touch of social conscience in the form of a moving montage of interviews with real nonactors who’ve recently lost their jobs. But the movie, like Clooney’s nattily attired Ryan Bingham, seldom wades beyond knee-deep into the messy travails of working people. In one interview sequence with a laid-off office worker, who earlier gave up his life’s dream of being a chef, the movie even dares to suggest that unemployment can be a disguised blessing, an opportunity for spiritual growth.

Maybe. But try telling that to the man or woman who just got canned, with no health coverage, a mortgage and kids to put through college. “Up in the Air” is a feel-good, feel-bad flick that takes a passing swipe at heartless corporatism but satirizes rather than seriously questions let alone challenges the status quo.

Escapism

Today’s dominant strain of mildly curdled, shoulder-shrugging humor represents a narrower response to bad times than emerged during the 1930s and ‘40s. That epoch -- admittedly more prolonged and severe than our present one -- generated a wide range of cultural reactions: from the earnest social realism of “The Grapes of Wrath” and “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?” to the documentary advocacy journalism of photographers such as Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans, to the national narrative-building mural projects, to what one scholar refers to as the Marx Brothers’ “anarchic embrace of the absurd” in sending up the Jazz Age idiocies that precipitated the 1929 crash.

Of course, Depression-era Hollywood also diverted (distracted?) audiences with visions of glamorous high-society parties and rampaging gangsters. And Preston Sturges, in his satirical masterpiece “Sullivan’s Travels,” weighed the benefits of escapist entertainment versus earnest social crusading during hard times and came down in favor of escapism and against patronizing artistic appeals to the “common man.”

Another cultural touchstone of that time, the blisteringly satirical fiction of Nathanael West (“Miss Lonelyhearts,” “The Day of the Locust”), transcended mere black comedy. While pointing toward a troubling void in American society and the American soul, West’s fiction also conveys an empathy for his hard-luck characters and a certain admiration for their scrappy resiliency.

“His books are very funny but also, in a way that’s characteristic of the ‘30s, oddly populist,” said Jeffrey Allred, an assistant professor of English at Hunter College in New York, who has written about Depression-era culture. “They’re cynical and very harsh, but I think there’s also a kind of underdog aspect to it.”

A modern-day equivalent of West is Jess Walter, who channels Main Street outrage while deftly sustaining his protagonist’s rueful humor in his novel “The Financial Lives of the Poets,” published last year. The book is a middle-class Horatio Alger tale in reverse, the riches-to-rags saga of one Matthew Prior, who hits on the dodgy idea of starting a website combining free-verse poetry with financial advice and winds up nearly losing his marriage, home, car and moral faculties.

In a recent phone interview, Walter said he started writing his book during the stock market implosion in 2008. At first, he said, the financial chatter on CNBC and NPR seemed abstract. Then several friends and his wife got laid off.

“When I write satire, it’s always informed by a little bit of rage,” Walter said. “I set out to write a rant.”

It’s a rant laced with a good deal of comic self-pity and self-reproach, as Matt acknowledged that much of his bad luck was brought on by his own gullibility and greed. “I’d love to go back to a 2004 cocktail party, beat those sure-sounding real estate idiot optimists to death with a For Sale sign,” he confessed. “I’d take a good whack at myself too.”

Walter thinks that part of what enables us to laugh at the Great Recession, however uneasily, is the recognition that many of us made fools of ourselves through our own excesses. Though being victimized by others is seldom amusing, awareness of one’s self-victimization can be both comic and cathartic, he said.

Given the fragmented, niche-market nature of contemporary culture, Allred said, it’s unlikely that a modern-day Steinbeck or Capra “is going to capture everyone’s imagination” during the current recession. But he sees hints of a more profound cultural dialogue about the re-booting of American capitalism in movies such as “The Wrestler” and “Gran Torino.”

What these films share, he said, is a willingness to search for deeper, subtler clues as to why the world’s economic champ took a tumble to the mat. And he said that the montage of first-person interviews in “Up in the Air” -- though not to be confused with Capra -- could be “almost a nod or an homage to Depression-era culture.”

“It’s trying to break through the Hollywood glamour,” Allred said, “and give you this immediate contact with ordinary people and open a channel of sympathy.”

reed.johnson@latimes.com